The songs Michael Stipe was too horrified to listen to again: “No good for me”
Just as many actors refuse to watch their own films, there are a lot of musicians out there who aren’t keen on the idea of revisiting old material. After all, creating art is a pretty physically demanding activity, and sometimes the emotions conjured up are best left in the past; something Michael Stipe has had to come to terms with over the years.
REM might have emerged from Athens, Georgia, in the wake of the ‘anything goes’ age of punk rock revolution, but they were never without substance. From the masterful – if totally ignored – origins of their first few releases, to the mainstream smashes of their late 1980s and early 1990s period, when they commanded the American alternative scene like no other, Stipe always filled his creative output with an unparalleled degree of emotional intensity.
It is no surprise, then, that records like Document and Automatic for the People still seem to carry such an unavoidable emotional weight. Even after all these years, over a decade on from REM’s final album, Collapse into Now, the material Stipe and the band created during their heyday still remain so close to the hearts of audiences everywhere, leaving Stipe with a multitude of mixed emotions.
On one hand, there isn’t a songwriter out there who would not yearn for the kind of longevity and adoration cultivated by Stipe and REM. Nevertheless, when you are a constantly moving, evolving artist, the popularity of those earlier efforts can begin to act like a rather inconvenient anchor, forcing you to tread the same path over and over again.
Stipe, to his credit, has never been one of those artists who refuse to perform his most popular material, but that doesn’t mean he takes great pleasure in being plunged back into that time in his existence, and in 2017, for instance, he was tasked with looking over a deluxe reissue of Automatic for the People released on its 25th anniversary by Craft Recordings, which wasn’t a particularly enjoyable experience for the songwriter.
Namely, the reissue included a selection of demo recordings from the original Automatic sessions from back in 1991. “I listened to as many of them as I could,” the songwriter told Dazed at the time. “I think I got to the middle of the fourth one and was like, ‘I cannot bear to listen to this.’”
Seemingly, while those demos provide fans with a stunning insight into the production of one of the most iconic alt-rock records of all time, Stipe himself isn’t desperate to revisit that era. “Well, it’s me at my most vulnerable,” he attested. “The ones that have my voice on it, I’m stretching, I’m reaching, I’m trying, I’m experimenting.”
Explaining the recording process, he continued, “You go in and you just put your voice to tape. Often, I’m not even trying to sing; I’m just trying to find a part. So for me it’s a bit horrifying.” Stipe concluded, “It’s there for the completists and musicologists, but it’s no good for me.”
Whether it is a result of the incredible emotional effort Stipe poured into those recordings, or merely the universal experience of hating hearing your own voice on tape, the songwriter seemingly couldn’t bear to revisit those demo recordings; in stark contrast to his legions of devotees, for whom the release of the demos came as a long-awaited cause for jubilance.
